


The Game: A Warmer Ghost Story

by thatsrightdollface



Series: Another Act: Saiouma Stories from After [2]
Category: New Dangan Ronpa V3: Everyone's New Semester of Killing
Genre: Angst, Board Games, M/M, Post-Canon, Spoilers!, but also coziness, ghost story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-16
Updated: 2018-08-21
Packaged: 2019-06-28 03:20:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,772
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15699099
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsrightdollface/pseuds/thatsrightdollface
Summary: Shuichi and his roommates are playing a board game - the game of their lives, really - and Kokichi joins them.





	1. Setting Up the Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> Okay, so Jericho_Pryce suggested I write about v3 characters playing a Danganronpa-themed board game, and I Ghost Kokichi-ed it. Thank you, Jericho~ <3 And also... I hope anybody who reads this enjoys it!! Thank you very very much.
> 
> ... This is very different than my other Saiouma ghost story, so far, but my hope is that it'll be fun either as a sequel or a different possibility~

Every week for a while, now, Shuichi Saihara and his roommates had pulled out The Game.  They did it on Sundays, because that was when everybody was both off from work in the afternoon _and_ not expected to hurry away to any classes.  Maki and Himiko would always have the board set up by the time Shuichi got back from the library, by now, as reflexively – as unavoidably – as a muscle spasm.  Shuichi would come home with his black leather bookbag digging into his shoulder and grim, too-exhausted eyes.  Eyes that remembered what it had been like when they’d been sleepless and burning, staring straight into the Mastermind of Danganronpa Season Fifty-Three’s face…  Remembered all too well, no matter how many months passed by.  Maki and Himiko would be sitting at the table waiting for him, pieces already set in front of them.  Pieces wearing their own faces, ready to play out their roles.  Himiko’s even had a little mage hat balanced adorably on her tiny head.  If they bought the right expansion pack, they could gather up other little hats for her, too.  Magical girl hats, Harry Potter hats.  The works.

It wasn’t so much that they wanted to play The Game, you know.  But it _was_ the story of their lives, laid out in The Monokubs’ Infamous Bonus Cards and morbidly tongue-in-cheek Murder Dice to roll cupped in sticky palms.  Tsumugi Shirogane – that cloying, “plainly unassuming” Mastermind who had written them all into being – had scribbled out The Game’s dialogue options, too, to make the Danganronpa company a little extra cash while the season was being aired.  The Game had the last of all Shuichi’s lost friends’ voices left rattling around inside it, and they still hadn’t gotten every possible ending yet.  Maybe they played to hear the dead speak, again.  Maybe they played to learn secrets about their own selves Tsumugi had stuffed into the paragraphs and paragraphs of cut scenes.  Some of Maki’s tucked-away childhood memories, Himiko’s favorite sort of birthday cake, Shuichi’s numbered list of fears…  There they were in plain text.  Waiting in that little booklet that came with The Game, for anyone to see.

Shuichi’s text was always written in a somber, sleet-rain grey.  Like a dim city, smothered in fog and full of mysteries waiting for the Ultimate Detective to track them down – like carriages over cobblestones, like Sherlock Holmes, like moral ambiguity.  Or something.  But Shuichi didn’t play as his own self, usually.

That Sunday it was so bright and friendly outside they had to close all the blinds before they played.  Wouldn’t have felt right, otherwise.  Shuichi leaned against the door for a second before he made his way over to the gameboard, trying to shove all the Criminology textbooks he’d been studying out of his brain.  Pretending he couldn’t hear the birds singing outside, flitting between telephone poles and against an empty blue sky.  Bringing himself back to _that place_ , just for a while.  That world he’d been written for, and denied in front of the whole planet, and left behind – that world where so many of his friends were stuck forever like bugs caught in amber.  Korekiyo, cooked over a fire, melting into the salt of his own tears and boiling blood…  Kaede, strung up and puppeted by a noose, hanging limp as her body was forced to play one last song…

Kokichi, crushed beneath a hydraulic press and trying to believe he really could trick the game with one final gamble.  Trick the Mastermind.  Save everyone.  They’d buried Kokichi’s clothes symbolically, Shuichi had heard, along with whoever had worn his skin before him’s first written application to be on the Danganronpa show.  There wasn’t anything left of his body to bury, after all.  Bloody smears.  Crushed bone.  Shuichi had seen it, and he saw it again in dreams, sometimes.  Too often.

 _“Aw,”_ he imagined Kokichi might’ve said, hearing about all that and snickering past his fingers.  Stringing his voice out into something so syrupy, so teasing.  _“Wow – it really does look like Mr. Detective misses me!”_

Shuichi played as Kokichi Oma on Sundays, when he and Maki and Himiko went back to that place.  At first, he’d said he played Kokichi to understand him better – to unravel his motivations, to decide what he thought of him once and for all – but by now he thought probably his roommates…  His fellow survivors…  Knew there was more to it than that.

“I thought I’d make tempura, after this round,” Maki said.  Her hair was loose – freshly washed and smelling like vanilla.  She bought sweeter soaps than someone might expect from the former Ultimate Assassin, and usually read The Game’s cutscenes aloud because her voice shook the least.  “Sorry, though, Shuichi.  I couldn’t find Oma’s piece.”

“She looked for it for _ever_ ,” Himiko drawled.  She had her head propped up on her folded arms, and her eyes were red like she’d just been crying a little.  Shuichi wasn’t going to say anything about that.  Himiko had tried to play Tenko Chabashira’s role a couple times now, but had never managed to go through with it.  “I had to put together the school cutouts all by myself.”

Normally, Maki would’ve set Kokichi’s smirking little game piece in front of Shuichi’s spot, with all his attachable masks in a neat row next to the Murder Dice.  There was blank-faced, knowing Kokichi; there was scheming, stretch-smiled Kokichi; there he was cackling like he’d just conquered a small kingdom and was generously advising its shivering monarchy to kneel.  The Ultimate Supreme Leader.  Or, part of him.  Slivers of self, or playful lies, growing more and more desperate as The Game that was their lives wore on.  Shuichi knew Kokichi’s most diabolical expressions…  His huge haunted eyes, his death-grins…  Were hidden in a separate little bag near the bottom of the game box.  They’d have to open it one of these days, probably, when they drew the right cards.

Kokichi’s body was truly, truly gone, though.  Not in the box, not by his faces.  That could be sort of horribly symbolic, Shuichi thought.  Here was a world where only the masks were left.  A world where they’d have to bury the clothes, and –

“I’ll play as myself,” Shuichi said.  “Fine.  Fine.”  His own piece came with a hat, he knew, and a little sack for case files…  For multicolored plastic poison bottles so small it was like they were designed to fall between cracks in the floor.  And maybe they were, you know?  There wasn’t much Shuichi would actually put past Tsumugi Shirogane, by that point.

Her game was nothing if not intricate.  She _had_ called them all her own beloved characters, once upon a time.

Shuichi left all Kokichi’s masks sitting spread out carefully while he set up his character cards.  Those masks wouldn’t fit over any other piece’s face, he knew that much.  He’d tried wearing Kokichi’s smile himself, soon after he bought The Game.  He’d heard a little snort of laughter in the air, about then, and decided it had probably been his own somehow.  He’d been alone, unpackaging everything.  He hadn’t wanted to tell Maki and Himiko he’d even brought The Game into their home, at first, but…

But it might’ve been a cruel secret to keep.

And also, The Game didn’t have a single player mode, it turned out.

It wasn’t until they’d stumbled upon that round’s first crime scene – drawn the first Grisly Death card from the stack, you know – that Kokichi’s piece turned up on the board.

Shuichi listened to Maki read the description of how Angie Yonaga died _this_ time around, with his eyes squeezed shut…

(She had been drowned in her own art studio sink, they would find out later, so that she’d gulped down paint in all sorts of dreamy, heaven-bright colors as she gasped for those last screaming breaths.  She was dumped in the pool to make it look like an accident, next, but of course there was still paint on her tongue.  Paint in her lungs and staining her teeth.  The culprit had never thought to check.

For now, though, Maki read about her floating, drowned and empty-eyed.)

… And when Shuichi looked up, there it was.

Kokichi’s piece, propped up right next to his own, like he was hoping to play at being detective partners again.

“Did –?” Shuichi started, looking between Maki and Himiko with what he just knew was a stricken expression on.  It felt like all the blood had been drained out of his body, just like in The Game’s spoof Vampire Ending expansion pack.

“No,” Maki said.  “No, _we_ didn’t put that there, at all.”


	2. Better Consult the Handbook

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again, and welcome to chapter 2!~ :D I hope you enjoy it if you read it, and I'm sorry for anything I might've messed up. This was really fun to write, honestly, ahahaha.
> 
> I ALSO hope you have a wonderful day~~~

To be honest, Shuichi had always believed in ghosts.

He couldn’t help it, actually: it was written into his character description, right there in The Game’s pamphlet.  Maki had theorized it might’ve been stuck in as a cute little Easter egg, because Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – ( _“Mr. Guy-Who-Wrote-Sherlock-Holmes!”_ Shuichi could just imagine Kokichi chiming in) – had believed in fairies.  And maybe that was true, you know?  They’d have to read further into Tsumugi’s author’s notes to get to that point, maybe, and she had left a _lot_ of notebooks behind.  Some of them had already been sold away online, by that point, auctioned off to deep-pocketed collectors who probably knew more about Shuichi’s own self than he could ever expect to.

But Shuichi _hadn’t_ been that surprised when he’d seen Kaede Akamatsu’s ghost during their season’s murder game, though, had he?  Not the way someone else might have been.  She’d been playing her piano in that Research Lab of hers, spectral and wavering and wearing the kind of soft smile a sister might have known how to slip on.  Soft as her wavy blonde hair, soft as her pale pink sweaters.  Shuichi had frozen in the doorway watching her, knowing he’d _just seen_ her body go waxy and still.  Remembering the noose, remembering the resigned, shivering horror in her eyes as Monokuma dragged her away.

It had been sort of right, seeing Kaede.  There she was, past death.  There she was, asking him to bring their friends through the storm as well as he could.

Shuichi had believed in Kaede’s ghost without question – without screaming, or having some sort of afterlife-related existential crisis, or suspecting anybody of using really mean-spirited special effects.

So maybe that was why Shuichi’s insides tumbled when he saw Kokichi’s piece planted next to his on the board…  (Out of the blue, yes, and not set there by any living fingers, any blood or bone at all)…  But not in a way that meant he was scared.  He was too aware of his pulse, yes, and he felt his breath catch like it had been snatched away from him.  Like a book right out of his hand, if Kokichi wanted to play.  Like the cap off a bottle of Panta, soda fizzing through the Ultimate Supreme Leader’s fingers and sticky-sweet as his taunting voice.

 _Yes_.

Yes, this explained a lot of things, actually.  Or it might.  Shuichi thought maybe he’d know soon enough.

Maybe it’d explain the days when he’d walked home from school alone but felt something soft brush his hand all the same…  Almost like another set of fingers wanting to swing their arms back and forth all playfully between them, like they belonged to a different sort of story.  And then…  And then, there _was_ the night when one of their neighbors had forgotten to turn off their oven and nearly burned the whole apartment building down, but said they were woken up by something invisible jumping on the foot of their bed…  And the day Shuichi knew he left an essay at home but then found it waiting in his backpack like some sort of magic, crumpled up and dirty, now…

Little things.  Handfuls and handfuls of little things that had left Shuichi wondering for a while if maybe his friends weren’t all so sealed-away and still as he had thought.  A shudder in the air; a Whoopee cushion on his boss’s seat.

Shuichi had always believed in ghosts, but now he thought maybe he was about to speak with one, again.  Now he thought maybe he should’ve tried a long time ago.

“Okay.  Uh,” the words weren’t coming out right.  _Kokichi’s name_ wasn’t coming out right.  Shuichi cleared his throat, messily and with Maki’s eyes fixed on him like she was still trying to decide how to react.  What to believe.  She and Himiko had both read Shuichi’s character description, too, of course.  They knew why he played Kokichi Oma’s game routes Sunday after Sunday; they knew why he was scanning the air wildly all around them, just then, gripping the table like it had become the edge of a cliff.

A while ago, Himiko had confessed that she sometimes wondered what else could have happened during Korekiyo’s séance, if the Ultimate Anthropologist had traced the salt patterns faithfully.  If his twisted-up heart had been honest, committed to the summoning.  She’d said, who knows?  Maybe her character description should’ve said she believed in ghosts, too, at least enough to _want_ to believe in them.  To believe Angie could’ve talked to her again, then, if the spell had been cast well.  To believe Tenko could be waiting somewhere, too, teaching old-timey lady ghosts how to dropkick any creepy poltergeists trying to mess with them.

“Hey, Kokichi,” Himiko drawled.  Her arms were wrapped around herself, but Shuichi knew she was trying to sound brave.  “I mean.  If you’re there, I guess…  Mm, I bet you noticed already, but Shuichi really misses you.  He’s not as mad as he used to be, and he keeps buying grape Panta none of us actually drink –”

“Himiko,” Maki whispered, a little stern but very warm.  The Ultimate Child Caregiver, the way she’d told them all she actually was, once.  She still hadn’t taken her eyes off Shuichi.  She was frozen and unblinking as a cat watching a dog pass from the side of the road, he thought.

Maybe this wasn’t Kokichi at all.  Maybe this was a stranger – potentially even a threatening stranger – or one of their neighbors playing a prank on them.  Everyone knew where Shuichi and his roommates had come from, after all, and what sort of game they’d been written for.  It was amazing what people could do with technology those days, wasn’t it?  So much of Shuichi’s self had been strung together in a computer, after all.  His memories and tastes, his fears and subconscious yearnings…  All coded into the meat of him, like a walking science fiction story.

But Shuichi managed to call, “Kokichi?  Do you…  Do you want to play The Game with us?” into the air, all the same.

Outside, sunlight was still drifting around all lazily and hot on the pavement, though it would sink into something quieter, soon.  There were voices on the stairs outside Shuichi’s apartment, and a rustling like grocery bags.  Normal things.  Average Sunday afternoon things, with the rest of an average week sprawled before them.  The thought felt so empty, all of a sudden.  Like the way Kokichi might’ve felt about the sharp black coffee Shuichi drank first thing when he woke up, now.  No sugar or candy-flavored sweetener or anything – boring!  Boring as plain buttered toast, which…  Ya know, oh look at that! – it seemed like Shuichi just happened to be eating, too.

Boring.  The world was so much more _boring_ , without Kokichi answering back.  Without him teasing, or tugging Shuichi around by the arm, or getting a chance to see the people he cared for learn about D.I.C.E.   A nonviolent clown gang with a not-so-murderous diabolical Supreme Leader…  Shuichi’d known that the world was a duller, colder, Kokichi-less place for months and months, now, but seeing his piece turn up out of nowhere – imagining that he might be able to reach them somehow, real as Kaede’s ghost had seemed and closer than Shuichi had dared to hope he’d ever get – brought it all back.

There was no answer, now, though, not for a long, long minute.  Shuichi knew he wouldn’t have wanted to meet his own eyes, just then.  There would’ve been too many strange, honest things inside them.

And then, The Game’s handbook flopped open into his lap.  When had it even left its spot over on Maki’s side of the table?  None of them had seen it move; any page-rustling sounds had been swallowed up by their own nervous voices, by their neighbors carrying in the groceries and all that.  By the too-cheerful birdsong, by all that average world.  Maki jumped, when it happened, and stared down at the spot next to her where the handbook was supposed to be.  Shuichi thought maybe – maybe – he heard a little distant, self-conscious laughter in the air.  It was the sort of laughter that would’ve been _supposed_ to sound boisterous, he knew that much.  Hearing it stung the back of his eyes, like exhaustion.  Like coming tears.

The handbook was opened to a page with a bunch of Kokichi’s dialogue options, from a scenario Shuichi, Maki and Himiko had played through a couple weeks back.  Now, normally Kokichi’s lines in The Game were written in a messy, playful font, unnervingly close to his own handwriting…  Until they suddenly weren’t.  Some of Kokichi’s lines were written in invisible ink, then, and whoever was playing him – whoever spoke in his voice that round – got to shine a little D.I.C.E.-themed flashlight down on them to sort out how the story’d go next.  The passage that was circled, just then, was one of the ones in invisible ink, because it was part of a Secret Plot not all the other players were supposed to know.

 _“Gonta can back me up on this one, actually,”_ Shuichi read aloud, the invisible ink flashlight feeling slick and not-quite-solid in his hand.  He’d read this line before, playing Kokichi’s role in the scenario.  _“ Of course the ‘terrifying ghost sounds’ were just me all along! That was the plan – we were trying to freak Kaito out so he’d confess.  And it worked, didn’t it?  Just…  Not with Kaito.  Nee-heehee!”_

Gonta’s next line was something about how Miu listening in had been a big surprise, if Shuichi remembered right.  It might’ve been a heartwarming scene, honestly – Kokichi and Gonta collaborating on purpose – except that they were still in The Game, weren’t they?  Except that the lines only got read during a Class Trial, and only if whoever was playing Kokichi made a certain set of choices and drew a certain set of Crime Scene Investigation Cards to get them there.  Someone still got murdered; someone would still pay for their crime.

“Just Kokichi – just _you_ – all along,” Shuichi laughed.  His voice sounded breathless and a little too close to sobbing.  He couldn’t stop thinking about how shaky the circle looked, scribbled around that dialogue box.  It seemed like maybe it had been difficult, reaching through to the living world.  Holding the pen.  “I didn’t – I can’t –”

There was so much Shuichi had imagined saying to the dead.  Things to say to Tenko, about how she should see how mourned she was – how remembered…  And about how her Neo Aikido would probably have been a really big hit at the gym where Maki went in the early, early mornings.  Things to say to Kaito, the hero, whose sidekick he’d been during some of the most stressful times in his life.   Things to say to all of them, actually, all his friends lost one by one, on TV, for the whole unfeeling world to watch and blog about.

But mostly, Shuichi had gathered up his words for Kokichi Oma.  He’d spent so many sleepless nights lying awake and carrying out imagined conversations with that guy, staring into the dark of his room…  He’d tried to swallow down months’ worth of questions and frustrated apologies and furious, embarrassingly tender goodbyes.  But now, none of those words would come for him.  They’d slipped away like water down a drain.

Shuichi wasn’t sure what to say, right now…  But that was alright.  Kokichi probably saw a lot of it on his face, anyway, and it looked like there was another handbook page that’d been dogeared since Shuichi’d seen it last.

This one’s circled dialogue option only read, _“Don’t you know I hate jokes and games, by now, Shuichi?  Can’t stand ‘em!”_

“Liar,” Shuichi said, then, like an answer.  He was surprised by the affection in his own voice, but he really, really shouldn’t have been.  He’d said the word _“Liar”_ just like someone else might’ve said _“Welcome home”_ or _“I love you.”_

“Sure, you can play,” said Himiko, using the sort of voice that meant she knew she’d seen weirder than this – than a ghost wanting to play board games with them all – and was resigned to the fact that she’d probably see weirder, still.  Only a matter of time.  “You have to draw a Crime Scene Investigation Card next.  We’ll let you go first, but only because…  Well.  You know.”

Shuichi had always believed in ghosts, of course – it was in his character description, the same way Kokichi’s said he had never actually cleaned his room on purpose – but it was still surreal watching Maki scoop up the stack of Crime Scene Investigation Cards…  Shuffling them between her long, pale fingers, getting them ready for Kokichi to draw his first one.  She smiled at him, Maki.  Smiled softly – softly and difficult to read, as always.

It was time to see what had happened to Angie in this one of The Game’s imaginary timelines…  What was happening to them all.  It was time to play another game with Kokichi Oma, just like they’d played with Yu-Gi-Oh! cards so long ago.

The rest…  The explanations, the understandings, everything…  Could come later.


	3. Play Through to the End (Or, You Know, an Epilogue)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahhhh, chapter 3!!! Thank you so much for reading this fic, and making it here to the ~epilogue chapter~. Sorry it's a bit short -- I meant it as a sort of conclusion to this particular scenario. :)
> 
> Thank you, again~

Shuichi never did see Kokichi’s face, that first day – that first time playing The Game together. He knew the former Ultimate Supreme Leader was probably smirking to himself as he read over his dialogue choices, before summoning up the undead will to circle one…  Kokichi was probably drumming his fingers on the table, now and then, and fiddling with his flippy grape-syrup hair as he thought things through.  Shuichi couldn’t see any of that, yet, but he kept trying to picture it all the same.  Kept reminding himself that it was real.  Kokichi was real, somehow, and absolutely, absolutely worth believing in, even if a person couldn’t exactly put the same faith in everything that came out of his mouth.

A couple of Kokichi’s dialogue options wound up scribbled out by the end, actually, and Shuichi could just imagine him scoffing down at them, or scowling, or wearing the kind of defensively bashful expression you wouldn’t really expect from a self-proclaimed maniacal tyrant.

 _“Okay, no.  Kaito can’t beat me in this argument… I’d have a much better comeback than that,”_ Shuichi thought maybe, maybe Kokichi was saying, far away enough that the living world swallowed up his voice like he was trying to scream underwater.  Or else, _“Ouch.  Let’s just forget about that one, ‘kay, Mr. Detective?  I was acting back then, you know.  Hasn’t anyone ever heard about ‘acting’ before?”_

It was honestly sort of satisfying, watching Kokichi’s edits appear on the Mastermind’s work.  Like the feeling of a fan against your face on a clutching, sticky-hot day; like realizing the map wasn’t making any sense because you were trying to read it upside down.  If anyone could have the laughing, irreverent nerve to poke holes in Tsumugi’s assessments of everyone – whether she’d written them all into being or no – it wasn’t too surprising that it was Kokichi Oma, was it?  Maybe Maki and Himiko were on something like the same page, too, because no one said a word about him defacing The Game’s handbook.  They were all living out the personalities Tsumugi had designed for them, sure – personalities she’d stitched together out of constructed memories and snappy costume ideas – but that had never been _all_ they were.  They’d proven it during that final trial, at the very least, and in all those other ways they’d kept their Mastermind guessing, having to rewrite her scenarios on the fly.

Maybe Kokichi gritted his teeth, eyes bright and wild, as he rolled a handful of dice to either double his pile of Crime Scene Investigation Cards or lose them all to a Monokubs’ Bonus towards the end of The Game’s third act…

(“I know,” Maki’d said, frowning down at the rules.  Explaining things.  “It doesn’t make any sense, having to forget the clues you already found if you get a bad roll.”

“I usually think of it like…  A forgetfulness curse,” Himiko had chimed in.  “Or it’s a really, _really_ specific kind of amnesia.”)

… And maybe Kokichi tsk-ed when Shuichi’s character piece turned out to be one of that round’s grisly murderers – with a preview of his execution music included in the game’s special CD, of course.  Or maybe he gasped dramatically and whispered, _“Oh no, Shuichi. How could you?!”_ in a voice that shook like he was truly, desperately scandalized and didn’t just think the whole thing was more of Tsumugi’s life-puppeting Mastermind nonsense.  Kokichi could’ve been doing any number of those things, but Shuichi couldn’t know for sure no matter how he strained his eyes.

(He _did_ see how carefully, how painfully, Kokichi wrote _“I think you know I missed you, too,”_ on the edge of the handbook cover, though, once the game was over and nobody had to read from it anymore.  It had taken Kokichi a really long time to write that particular, very specific sentence, he learned later…  But he’d committed to it.  Honestly, Kokichi probably spent most of that time muttering at the pen that kept slipping through his bones.  Muttering at his own ghost-hands.)

The day Shuichi Saihara looked Kokichi Oma in the actual, unliving face, again, they had just bought a new expansion pack from the game shop.  It was that one with a bunch of Himiko’s different mage hats, honestly.  She’d been asking for it, and apparently there were a couple playfully fantasy-themed game routes where players could roll to use actual magic.  Just like in Himiko’s actual day-to-day life, you know.

Kokichi was holding the door for the guy leaving the store after them – mostly just to see what he’d do about a door hanging open, supported by the empty air – when Shuichi caught his first glimpse of him.  It was Kokichi’s hand, before anything else, and it was still wearing the bandage Shuichi had put on it after that knife game they’d played.  When Kokichi had announced that he’d stolen Shuichi’s heart, all bravado and schemes; when Kokichi’d hinted… Or more than hinted…  That it truly meant something, the idea of Shuichi not forgetting him as long as he lived.

(As if Shuichi _could_ have forgotten him.  No, not happening.  Not even if he’d wanted to.)

That knife-game wound must’ve healed up a long time ago – before Kokichi’d died, even – and it wasn’t so much like ghosts bled or had any real reason to keep out infections with Band-Aids or what have you.  But Kokichi was wearing that bandage around the same way he was wearing his straightjacket-esque D.I.C.E. uniform Tsumugi had designed for him, with the fluffy chessboard scarf and those snapped chains hanging down and catching the light as he moved.  The same way he was carrying around his pens and other ghost-tools in a bag with Shuichi’s new school logo on it, in a little sign of solidarity he probably didn’t think Shuichi was going to see.

Kokichi was snickering, messing with the door and the baffled-looking stranger, at first…  But then he noticed Shuichi watching him.  _Seeing him_ – maybe there was something different in Shuichi’s face, just then – and that smile shifted into an expression of triumph and relief and wanting Shuichi had never seen before.  He didn’t think Kokichi could’ve faked something like that.  After everything that had happened, he didn’t think Kokichi would _want_ to fake something like that.

They would walk home together, next, and maybe Kokichi would ask to balance the game shop bag between them for a while to see how many weird looks Shuichi got.  They’d go home, and probably play another game before Maki and Himiko got back.  Something different, this time, and most likely involving a lot of cards with complicated descriptions.  The Game would wait its turn until next Sunday, after all.


End file.
